Brian Gongol
The WHO Radio Wise Guys airs on WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa on 1040 AM or streaming online at WHORadio.com. The show airs from 1 to 2 pm Central Time on Saturday afternoons. A podcast of show highlights is also available. Leave comments and questions on the Wise Guys Facebook page or e-mail them to wiseguys@whoradio.com.
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Listen to this week's podcast.
Spam comes in waves -- different types hit their peaks and valleys at different times, and occasionally a new type of attack pops up. We've been seeing one of those lately, with the rise of the absurd news headline spam, designed to get the unwary e-mail recipient to open a message carrying a virus that can in turn send out more spam as well as subjecting you to identity theft.
Some creative researchers have figured out how to turn cell phones into CCTV cameras. There's both promise and threat here: On the upside, we can use cell-phone video to do things like track severe weather in real time...but on the downside, we haven't even begun to address the security and privacy ramifications of having surveillance everywhere.
A caller wanted to know how to replace the clock battery in his iMac. Without knowing for certain exactly how to crack open that machine, we can point him to Apple's community-driven support website, where questions like this are answered all the time.
Brian stands by his assessment that "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" is one of the creepiest films ever. But when Nestle recently decided to give away a Willy-Wonka-style golden ticket for a trip to space, it seems ridiculously appropriate that the winner is a flight attendant.
It's pretty amazing to see how quickly rising gas prices have affected our behavior. In just a few short months, $4 a gallon gas has done more to change the auto industry -- sending truck and SUV sales plummeting and forcing rapid changes in what's being built -- than more than 30 years of Federal fuel-efficiency standards. And we aren't even paying as much for gas as our friends in Europe.
Keywords in this show:
Apple •
auto industry •
closed-circuit TV •
fuel efficiency standards •
gas prices •
golden ticket •
mobile phones •
networking •
privacy •
private space travel •
security cameras •
space travel •
spam •
surveillance •
surveillance creep •
tech support •
viruses •
Willy Wonka